So this biopic's been out for a few weeks now but it's just now broken into wide release. I just saw it, and I really loved it. I think you (yes you, person reading this) ought to see it.
It's a story that a lot of people don't really know about, for whatever reason. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. Basically Milk was one of the catalysts for the infamous Castro street in San Francisco becoming a gay enclave in the 70's (and thus the perception of San Francisco as the gayest city in the world), and when San Francisco tried out a new method of election for the city council by which individual neighborhoods chose their own representatives, the Castro district elected him to a city council seat. He then became an icon for gay rights as the (new, then) christian conservative movement began to push discriminatory laws all across the nation, and he famously helped to defeat Prop 6, a california law that would have made it possible to fire teachers for being gay, or supporting gay colleagues.
The biopic is directed by Gus van Sant, who's been off making more arty pictures for the last few years (
Elephant,
Paranoid Park,
Last Days, etc.) and he brings a dream-like quality to the picture. The cinematography is done by the same guy who worked cinematography for
Zodiac, and it feels very authentic. The casting is really well done, Sean Penn plays Milk and does a fantastic job, toning down his usual theatrics. James Franco is his longtime boyfriend Scott Smith, and Diego Luna plays Jack, Milk's newer, more unstable boyfriend. Josh Brolin, who's everywhere these days, plays Dan White, the awkward, jittery city councilman whose obsession with Milk eventually turns tragic.
Milk is a standard biopic by most accounts, well cast and crafted for sure, but it hits all the same crescendos as your usual biopic would. But this movie is special in that it is unfortunately current. The specter of Proposition 8 hangs over this film throughout, and the passion exhibited by Penn as Milk and the other characters amplifies the emotional efficacy of the film because of it. See, usually I'm pretty cynical about movies. I have a tendency to keep films at arms length when it comes to messages they try to send. Too often they feel labored or manipulative. But I saw this movie tonight with two friends of mine, who I love very dearly, who are gay, and they've had struggles in the past with their families, their friends and their communities. And seeing it with them I couldn't distance myself from what
Milk was attempting to convey. There were several moments throughout the film where we wept, particularly at one point, where Milk gets a phone call from a young man in Minnesota. But
Milk isn't a sad movie, not really. It's a very hopeful movie, and "hope" is a word that's been thrown around quite a lot lately but... the film depicts the sort of mindless invective that started with Anita Bryant and continues to this day through Rick Santorum and others but it's not really bitter. It doesn't have to be, because the humanity of the main characters is plainly evident.
I don't know, I haven't been affected by a movie like this in a very, very long while. Maybe it was the circumstances under which I saw it, but just in general I think it was a very, very good, very moving film. It might be the best movie I've seen this year, and that includes the wealth of films that hit in early Summer.
There's also a really brilliant documentary called "The Times of Harvey Milk" that came out in the... 80's, I think. You should also see that.
Here's an audio clip excerpt, from one of Milk's more famous speeches.
Has anybody else seen this movie? What does everybody think?
